Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel

'A carefully researched study...a provocative interpretation of how pedestrianism stimulated Romantic Poetry.' - Literature & History 'The section on Clare is the strongest in this study, offering the most nuanced reading of an oeuvre by a person who walked both for work and leisure...The discussion of Hazlitt's On Going a Journey helpfully fleshes out the political implications of walking in the wake of the French Revolution.' - Toby R. Benis, The Wordsworth Circle 'Robin Jarvis significantly refines our understanding of the material histories of walking and these histories' conjunctions with literature in Britain during the crucial period from the 1780s to the 1820s...a thoughtful, provocative study which also contributes to Romantic studies at large.' - Anne D. Wallace, Romantic Circles 'This is a deeply engaging book. Like the pedestrian mode which it takes as its subject it is unhurried, ambulatory, association; and yet at the same time it is also fully animated by a thoroughgoing sense of definite purpose and direction...[A]ppropriately enough, this is all undertaken in a style that is relaxed as well as reflective, so that the book itself comes to read like a peculiarly pleasurable kind of walk, with its well-prepared 'bridges' and smoothly-conducted transitions, its anecdotal byways and its more formal resting-places...[t]he richness and suggestivity of Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, and its very material relevance to any consideration of Romantic thought, that in the course of reading it one should be so often inspired to follow up some of its many 'hints and guesses', and to pursue for oneself one or two of its 'paths not taken.' - Gregory Dart, BARS Bulletin and Review 'Robin Jarvis's documentation of the needs and notions of walkers in the Romantic era provides essential grounds for further discussions'. - Michael Baron, John Clare Society Journal 'This is a committed book, researched in depth...highly accurate'. - Peter Larkin, The Coleridge Bulletin 'Robin Jarvis, in his stimulating book Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, is one of the new Romanticists writing today to link, in a serious and convincing way, cultural and historical decisions to choices poets make about...their poems.' - Jeffrey Robinson, Romanticism